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Letter N Activities

Preview: Letter N Activities that would be perfect for preschool or kindergarten. Art, fine motor, literacy, sensory and alphabet practice all rolled into Letter N fun.

This week in our weekly alphabet study is the letter N activities. We had some handwriting practice, literacy fun, two art projects, and a fun new sensory bin that reviewed the letters we've learned so far.

Letter N Picture Book

To start our study of the letter N and a week of fun activities, we read the book The Best Nest by P.D. Eastman. We talked about how the word nest starts with N. Then I showed my daughter what an N looked like in the book and we searched for other N's. I made sure to pick a book that matched the picture that we would create next for our alphabet art book.

Letter N Alphabet Art Book

For the alphabet book we are working on, we added N is for Nest. We used brown paper shred to make the nest. If it wasn't winter and snowy here we probably would have collected some twigs to glue on to make the nest, but paper would have to do this time. This was an easy picture to make - just add glue and squish the paper on and then let it dry. The alphabet book is part of my Alphabet Centers with Real Pictures.

Letter N Handwriting Practice

To practice writing the letter N, I put our alphabet tracing sheets in a reusable plastic sleeve and gave her a dry erase marker. Now that we are in our routine, she easily works on this and the letter identification task without any help or prompting from me. I just leave it on the table and she knows what to do.

Letter N Identification

We practiced identifying the letter N in all different fonts with our N page from our Alphabet Centers pack. We pulled out our bingo dot markers and she dabbed the upper and lowercase Ns. Dot markers are such an easy and fun tool to have on hand. You can use them like this to find and cover something, make pictures with them, write with them, etc. I've had both of our sets for several years and they are still going strong.

Letter N Sensory Bin

For some sensory fun, I made a bin that was filled with noodles (N is for Noodles.) This is so easy to make and you dye it just like we did the rice in our Letter M sensory bin. I've used the vinegar recipe in the past, but I feel like the smell of vinegar lingers every time we get that filler out and it takes a long time to dry. For an easier method, dump the uncooked noodles into a Ziploc bag with a few squirts of hand sanitizer and some food coloring (gel seems to be the most vibrant.) Then squish it up and spread it out on a cookie sheet to dry and then repeat with another color. It dries SO much faster than the other method that takes hours. I've also done cooked noodles before if you want to try that instead. You just can't play with that bin as long and I'm not sure what would happen with the ABC cards even though they are laminated. The wet/stickiness of the noodles might make more of a mess but they are definitely fun to play with in a bin by themselves.

Once I had the noodles in place, I threw in some of our letter and picture puzzles from our Real Pictures Alphabet Centers. These are 4 piece puzzles that include the letter and three pictures that start with that letter. To make it a little easier and because I was using our smaller bin, I just did one picture per letter and I only put in a few matches at a time. She worked on finding the matches. Some were easier than others. She knows a few words for each letter but if the picture is not one of those words, she gets stuck.

Letter N Fine Motor Practice

To build up those little hand muscles we pulled out playdough for some fine motor practice. We worked on rolling snakes and making the letters M-P. This takes her awhile and I know it is hard sometimes to roll or squish that playdough, but it is crucial to build those muscles before little ones are expected to hold and write with pencils for any length of time.

Letter N Art Project

We decided to do an extra art project all about the night sky (N is for Night). I took black construction paper and some star and moon cutouts. I stuck the cutouts to the paper using washi tape so it could be easily removed.

Then I took some of our sidewalk chalk and ran it under water. This technique is usually better if you let the chalk soak for 5-10 minutes. By using wet chalk, the colors are more vibrant and the paper doesn't get a lot of powdery residue. As you can tell from parts of the picture, we didn't let the chalk soak long enough.

Then we made little lines coming out of the stars. We talked about making the lines really close together so that when we took off the cutout, it looked like a star. The lines made them look like shooting stars in the night sky. When you are done, just leave your chalk pieces out to dry and then they are ready to be used outside again.